Sage Kotsenburg rides style to top of Olympic podium

Feb. 8, 2014
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Sage Kotsenburg (USA) reacts after his first run during men's slopestyle finals at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park on Saturday. He won the first gold medal of the Sochi Olympics as slopestyle made its debut at the Winter Games. / Nathan Bilow-USA TODAY Sports

by Rachel Axon, USATODAY

by Rachel Axon, USATODAY

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia â?? Let's go snowboard, Sage Kotsenburg's coach told him with the biggest competition in his life looming. The 20-year-old American enthusiastically echoed his coach. Let's go snowboard.

He did, and then he won gold.

Kotsenburg became the first American since 1952 to win the first gold medal of a Winter Olympics and only the fourth ever to do so when he won the snowboard slopestyle event at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park on Saturday.

"The best ambassador you could have for snowboarding right now. Just showing the true love of the sport," said Mike Jankowski, head coach of the U.S. Freeskiing and Snowboarding teams.

"To be that stylish is technical. To do those grabs is more difficult than to not. He wants to put his stamp on the run. The course is a canvas and your board is the paintbrush, and he's really doing that to a T."

Earlier Saturday after he'd advanced from the semifinal, Kotsenburg marveled at the chance to make it to the final in the event's Olympic debut. He came to the Games just hoping to get that far.

With all the drama that surrounded the event this week â?? Shaun White dropped out less than 24 hours before qualification, prompting tweets from Canadian riders about White's fear of being beat â?? the sport's first Olympic champion got a rider true to its soul.

Kotsenburg had been overlooked as a contender here, overshadowed by the absence of his American teammate and the presumed success of Canadian Mark McMorris, who entered as a gold medal favorite but took bronze.

Concerns about the course and the judging drew more attention than the mellow rider who gets on his board for the love of shredding more than the love of winning contests.

If that were what sustained him, he might have been done a while ago. Kotsenburg won the final U.S. qualifying event in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., last month, earning his first trip to the top of the podium in about 9 years.

The last one he remembers before that was a USASA competition when he was 11.

"I had a mega drought there for a minute," he said from the press conference here, an American flag draped over his shoulders like a towel.

Instead, Kotsenburg's riding is about doing what's fun, and doing it with style. With some of the most creative grabs in snowboarding, he found his way atop the podium here.

His winning run included a Holy Crail, a grab he invented by combining a Japan and crail grab. He also landed a backside 1620 Japan air on the final jump, a trick he had never done before which entails spinning 4.5 times in the air while grabbing the toe edge of his board.

He decided to do the trick only a few minutes before his run, calling his 22-year-old brother, Blaze, in the States to see if it was a good idea.

"I kind of just go with it and just march to my own beat," said Kotsenburg. "It's kind of how I roll my own snowboarding career, so I thought why change it when I got here."

Finding a balance

In its first Olympic gold medal winner, slopestyle got the perfect mix of where the sport has been and where it's going. His style harkens back to the old snowboard movies he watched as a kid, ones where riders put a premium on grabs and style.

And while Kotsenburg doesn't fully embrace the spin-to-win mentality that has made a triple cork a must-have trick in the event, he does find a way to do difficult tricks with his own twist.

"There's a happy medium to spinning a lot and all that stuff," he said.

In taking his unlikely trip to the top of the podium, Kotsenburg beat some of the best riders in the world who have progressed the sport in the past couple years with its most difficult trick.

An off-axis flip three times, the triple cork made McMorris a favorite to win here. Canadian Maxence Parrot won X Games gold last month by becoming the first rider to land two in a run.

McMorris matched that at the Olympics, landing different variations of the triple on his first and third jumps in his second run. But his score placed him second to Kotsenburg until Norwegian Staale Sandbech knocked McMorris down the podium.

"His style was amazing," said Parrot, who finished fifth. "I guess if the judges were looking for style today, Sage is for sure winning. There's no doubt."

Added British rider Billy Morgan, "Sage's run was really technical, and even though his tricks are ridiculously stylish, putting the extra grabs and doing different grabs in tricks just adds to the difficulty. As he does his style, he's putting way more difficulty on his tricks, which is why Sage now is the Olympic champion."

Being the best

As a 9-year-old, Kotsenburg saw firsthand what winning a gold medal was like. The Park City, Utah, native attended the 2002 Games, which held the mountain events in his hometown.

That year, Americans swept the halfpipe. It inspired Kotsenburg, but it was never why he snowboarded. He wants to do well, to get on podiums, but it's about much more than that for him.

In a time where snowboarders are spending increasingly more time training off snow to prepare themselves for the acrobatic tricks required at the highest level, Kotsenburg is the exception. He does yoga in the spring, but he hasn't been to the gym since September.

In that way, the 20-year-old is an old soul. He snowboards because he loves it and he becomes a better snowboarder by riding rather than lifting weights.

"If you know how you snowboard the best, you can be the best," he said.

Still, even Kotsenburg didn't imagine this version of the best â?? Olympic champion. After he failed to advance to the final through Thursday's qualification round, his focus on Saturday was on the semifinal. Of the 21 riders competing, only four made it to the final.

He skipped the opening ceremony to rest for the two competitions in one day. After making it, he was amazed that in 30 years he could tell people he was even in the first Olympic slopestyle final.

Now he's trying to adjust to the fact that he'll forever be an Olympic champion.

"I heard it's going to be crazy. I'm definitely stoked to be a part of it," he said. "Obviously I'm stoked to get gold and take whatever comes with it."

By the time he'd reached the press conference on the mountain, Kotsenburg had a glimpse of the reaction that awaits him when he returns home. Blaze Kotsenburg sent him a video of family and friends cheering as they watched the event in the early morning hours from half a world away.

For Kotsenburg and his family, there would be little sleep after the soul shredder reached the peak of his sport by doing it his way.

"He's a very good spokesman for snowboarding, whether he is on that podium or not. He loves the sport," said his father, Steve Kotsenburg, from his home in Utah. "If you're not having fun with this sport, it's not worth it to you.

"He's a really good representation of wanting to keep it fun in this sport."

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